Thom Yorke performed a new song and unearthed deep cuts from both his Radiohead and solo catalogs at the first show of the Australasian leg of the singer’s Everything Tour.
Playing at Christchurch, New Zealand’s Wolfbrook Arena on Wednesday, Yorke debuted a new track called “Back in the Game,” a presumed collaboration with electronic music artist Mark Pritchard; the song title first emerged on a reported list of a dozen new songs co-written by the two artists.
The Everything Tour lived up to its name with a set list that spanned Yorke’s entire catalog, from acoustic renditions of Radiohead classics (“Weird Fishes/Arpeggi,” “Karma Police,” “How to Disappear Completely”), to side project tracks (Atoms for Peace’s “Default,” the Smile’s “Bodies Laughing” from their just-released Cutouts), to collaborations (UNKLE’s “Rabbit in Your Headlight”), to his solo songs to his Suspiria score, and more.
The Christchurch gig also featured some seldom-to-never-played cuts, including the first performance of Radiohead’s Amnesiac opener “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box” since 2012 and the first-ever performance of “Hearing Damage,” Yorke’s contribution to the Twilight: New Moon soundtrack back in 2009.
Yorke’s Everything Tour is slated to run through November, with the singer following up the New Zealand and Australia trek with a run of dates in Singapore and Japan. After that, Yorke will see the staging of Hamlet Hail to the Thief, another Radiohead-related project, but don’t assume a reunion is happening in the near future.
“I am not aware of it and don’t really give a flying fuck,” Yorke said of Radiohead rumors. “No offense to anyone and thanks for caring. But I think we’ve earned the right to do what makes sense to us without having to explain ourselves or be answerable to anyone else’s historical idea of what we should be doing.”
He added of the lack of pressure he feels to live up to Radiohead’s success, “I don’t think we feel the need to live up to anything. That feels like a non-problem. We are in this privileged position where we are still able to make music because of Radiohead, so no complaints.”
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